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Tackling knitting errors in R Markdown

When knitting an R Markdown document after the first time, errors may sometimes appear. Three tips are recommended below. 1. Close PDF reader window When the document is knitted through the ‘Knit’ button, a PDF reader window opens to present the result. Closing this window can help resolve errors. 2. Delete service files Every time the Rmd is knitted, some service files are created. Some of these files have the ‘.

Parallelizing simr::powercurve() in R

The powercurve function from the R package ‘simr’ (Green & MacLeod, 2016) can incur very long running times when the method used for the calculation of p values is Kenward-Roger or Satterthwaite (see Luke, 2017). Here I suggest three ways for cutting down this time. Where possible, use a high-performance (or high-end) computing cluster. This removes the need to use personal computers for these long jobs. In case you’re using the fixed() parameter of the powercurve function, and calculating the power for different effects, run these at the same time (‘in parallel’) on different machines, rather than one after another.

Brief Clarifications, Open Questions: Commentary on Liu et al. (2018)

Liu et al. (2018) present a study that implements the conceptual modality switch (CMS) paradigm, which has been used to investigate the modality-specific nature of conceptual representations (Pecher et al., 2003). Liu et al.‘s experiment uses event-related potentials (ERPs; similarly, see Bernabeu et al., 2017; Collins et al., 2011; Hald et al., 2011, 2013). In the design of the switch conditions, the experiment implements a corpus analysis to distinguish between purely-embodied modality switches and switches that are more liable to linguistic bootstrapping (also see Bernabeu et al.

Collaboration while using R Markdown

In a highly recommendable presentation available on Youtube, Michael Frank walks us through R Markdown. Below, I loosely summarise and partly elaborate on Frank's advice regarding collaboration among colleagues, some of whom may not be used to R Markdown (see relevant time point in Frank's presentation). The first way is using GitHub, which has a great version control system, and even allows the rendering of Markdown text, if the file is given the extension ‘.

Notes about punctuation in formal writing

When writing formal pieces, some pitfalls in the punctuation are easy to avoid once you know them. Punctuation marks such as the comma, the semi-colon, the colon and the period are useful for organising phrases and clauses, facilitating the reading, and disambiguating. However, these marks are also liable to underuse, as in the case of run-on sentences; misuse, as in the comma splice; and overuse, as it often happens with the Oxford comma.

Stray meetings in Microsoft Teams

Unwanted, stranded meetings, overlapping with a general one in a channel, can occur when people click on the Meet (now)/📷 button, instead of clicking on the same Join button in the chat field. This may especially happen to those who reach the channel first, or who cannot see the Join button in the chat field because this field has been taken up by messages.

R Markdown amidst Madison parks

This document is part of teaching materials created for the workshop 'Open data and reproducibility v2.1: R Markdown, dashboards and Binder', delivered at the CarpentryCon 2020 conference. The purpose of this specific document is to practise R Markdown, including basic features such as Markdown markup and code chunks, along with more special features such as cross-references for figures, tables, code chunks, etc. Since this conference was originally going to take place in Madison, let's look at some open data from the City of Madison.

How to engage Research Group Leaders in sustainable software practices

There is an increasing number of training courses introducing early career researchers to sustainable software practices but relatively little aimed at Research Group Leaders and Principal Investigators. Expecting group leaders to personally acquire such skills through training such as a two-day Carpentries workshop is unrealistic, as these require a significant time investment and are less directly applicable in the role of research director. In addition, many group leaders would not consider their group as outputting software, or are less aware of the full range of benefits that sustainable practice brings and will thus be less likely to signpost such training to their team members. Even where they do identify benefits, they may have concerns about releasing group software or may feel overwhelmed by the potential scale of the task, especially with respect to legacy projects.

Incentives for good research software practices

Software is increasingly becoming recognised as fundamental to research. In a 2014 survey of UK researchers undertaken by the Institute, 7 out of 10 researchers supported the view that it would be impossible to conduct research without software. As software continues to underpin more research activities, we must engage a variety of stakeholders to incentivise the uptake of best practice in software development to ensure the quality of research software keeps pace with the research it supports.

Data is present: Workshops and datathons

This project offers free activities to learn and practise reproducible data presentation. Pablo Bernabeu organises these events in the context of a Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship. Programming languages such as R and Python offer free, powerful resources for data processing, visualisation and analysis. Experience in these programs is highly valued in data-intensive disciplines. Original data has become a public good in many research fields thanks to cultural and technological advances. On the internet, we can find innumerable data sets from sources such as scientific journals and repositories (e.g., OSF), local and national governments, non-governmental organisations (e.g., data.world), etc. Activities comprise free workshops and datathons.